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At 2 am on a cold January morning earlier this year, Prime Minister KP Oli woke abruptly in my fictional world drenched in sweat, heartbeat racing, and fists clenched. It wasn’t just that he was not well or that he had been briefed of a potentially deadly virus.

That morning, the prime minister was startled by a sudden realization of the two deadliest mistakes of his life. First, from some 50 years ago: Oli, then only a young firebrand communist, had led the Jhapa Revolt, beheading landowners. Second, three years ago on election-eve: Oli forged an electoral alliance with the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist Centre), merged the two parties and secured an unprecedented mandate.

That cold morning, the prime minister awoke to a premonition of how the two greatest errors of his life would collide. It unfolded 12 months later, on Sunday, when in defiance of comrades in his own party, he recommended dissolution of a democratically elected parliament (the President complied), and called fresh election, earning himself the moniker of an authoritarian.

From revolution-provocateur beheading landlords to authoritarian-provocateur debasing the constitution, Prime Minister Oli has exhibited through his life and politics what all of us Nepalis have become. For his courage in reflecting our collective cowardice, Prime Minister Oli is my pick for the person of the year.

The odds were always against Oli. He was a rare survivor of the Jhapa Revolt. Most others were summarily rounded up and executed in a forest. He spent 14 years in prison, often in solitary confinement, peddling poems he had written in return for a few favors. Beyond his idealistic youth, his achievements are a story of endurance built on the philosophy of political expediency where the end justifies the means.

This philosophy of political expediency was in display when he responded in a 10-page letter to the charges levelled against him by party’s co-chair. In it, he documents how Prachanda, the co-chair, himself defied the constitution by disrupting the elections when Prachanda’s daughter was losing (party workers tore the ballots during the count, the results were annulled, and a fresh election ordered, which she won). Political expediency required the prime minister to simply ignore such a blatant violation of an election—the core of democracy—simply because the partnership was important at the time. The end justified the means.

The greatest tragedy of Nepal’s democracy was that one party won such an overwhelming majority. A coalition government would have been better, and offered more political stability, in establishing the institutions necessary for Nepal’s young democracy. Oli had put aside many years of bitterness and criticism about the Maoists when he announced the electoral alliance and subsequent merger of the two parties. It was simply political expediency, for he knew, just as almost everyone guessed, the combined party would return with a resounding victory. The end justified the means.

When Prime Minister Oli first took office in 2015, he immediately proclaimed five other revolutionaries of the Jhapa Revolution as national martyrs. Every year, around February, Nepal Communist Party gathers to remember the martyrs of the Maoist uprising and the previous armed movements, like the Jhapa uprising. No one pauses to remember the victims of the conflict.

Almost 50 years after the beheading of landowners, the families of those victims are still waiting for justice and closure. Approximately 2,500 complaints of disappearance and 63,000 cases from the Maoist-era conflict are pending at the Commission of Investigation on Enforced Disappeared Persons and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Today, the prime minister’s decision to dissolve parliament is being debated in terms of democratic principles. But can there really be a discussion about democratic principles when thousands of families whose loved ones were killed, tortured, kidnapped, and displaced are still waiting for the justice they were promised? Our constitution and political progress have been written in blood. We have a peace accord but are still at war with each other.

The tragedy of this political turmoil is not that a stable government has fallen. The tragedy is that we, ordinary Nepalis, have simply forgotten the victims who suffered the abuses of conflict. Parliament may fall, a new one may arise. But Nepali democracy is meaningless unless the blood that drips on our consciousness is cleaned—not by the State but by us, the people of Nepal.

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Suppose you have been given a death sentence and are awaiting the execution. Luckily, you also have a lifeline: there is an open pot full of mustard seeds in your prison room. If you take it to the palace without spilling even one seed, you will be pardoned. Your executioner will follow you and if one mustard seed falls to the ground, he will behead you. You see hope in this plan, and set forth from the prison carrying the pot.

But as soon as you step out of the gate, all sorts of distractions await you: sumptuous food, exquisite wine, tantalizing sex, treasure troves, and what-not. There are adorable men and women promising you great time together. And there are despicable people provoking you in all possible ways; doing things to challenge and threaten your tiny little self; instigating you; compelling you to react in anger; or maybe frighten you to run. There are roadblocks every here and there. There are enough reasons to keep you from reaching your goal. What will you do?

Most probably, you will overcome those obstructions and carry the pot to the palace as told. Those seductions and repulsions won't stop you. Possibly you may not even notice them, as your survival is far more important than anything else! This is how you function when you are in a life-and-death situation and you have run out of options.

Most probably, we too are in a similar life-and-death situation. And we have only very few options left, if we really care to look at it.

Thankfully, enlightened people come to our help from time to time. Sometimes a Buddha, a Krishna, or a Mahavir appears and shows us the way. Our prisons are deceptive, and once you are in, you won't see it. But these masters not only show us our prisons, they also give us a plan to come out of it. Out of great compassion, they remind us that our execution may come at any moment, and encourage us to free ourselves before it's too late. Unless you are a hopeless loser, you'll understand the gravity of the matter and set out on the salvation path immediately. If you go exactly as told, and avoid doing absolutely egregious things to entangle yourself along the way, you will make it.

But which prison are we talking about? And what execution are we going to face?

Obviously, we are not talking about a physical prison, but the prison of our mind—the mental bondages we create for ourselves. And we face small executions each day, every now and then. It comes in the form of some anguish, anger, lust, jealousy or a similar emotion that unsettles us. We don't know when such emotion takes over next and kills our peace. The final execution comes at the moment of death when you take your troubled and anguished mind—a work of your lifetime—to your afterlife.

Knowing the rules of the game, enlightened masters tell us to stop being bonded when we still have time. They explain it in their own ways, in their own words. They give us different roadmaps. But their gist is the same: avoid destructive behavior, engage in constructive behavior, and keep the purity of your mind. In our story above, we set an intention to be free from the prison (keep the purity of mind), set forth towards the goal (constructive behavior), and overcome distractions (destructive behavior) along the way. A verse from Dhammapada, a central Buddhist text, sums it up:

To avoid all evil, 

to cultivate good, 

and to cleanse one's mind 

—this is the teaching of the Buddhas. 

(Dhammapada, verse 183)

Foreign policy is but an extension of domestic policy, goes an old Bismarckian saying. The current Nepali regime found the axiom relevant enough to include in its new foreign policy document. But in our case, could the opposite be as true? Could Nepal’s domestic politics be but an extension of its foreign policy? 

India has had a major—if not the decisive—role in each of contemporary Nepal’s major political changes. Back in the late 1940s, without the Indians getting worried about the prospect of the communist China gobbling up Nepal (after Tibet), perhaps it would not have given refuge to King Tribhuvan and backed Nepali democratic forces against the reigning Ranas. The 1989 border blockade had a big role in the removal of absolute monarchy in 1990. Pretty much the same story of active Indian intervention has been repeated in more recent times.

New Delhi set the terms of the 2005 12-point agreement—the precursor to all recent progressive changes. In 2015, India blatantly intervened in Nepal’s constitutional process, pushing the Nepali prime minister into China’s open arms. This marked the start of China’s unprecedented sway in Nepal. In fact, whenever Kathmandu has felt threatened by the south, it has invariably looked north for succor. 

The Nepali Congress internalized the ideals of independent India’s founders and the party has since had a soft spot for the largest democracy in the world. Nepali communists, naturally, borrowed heavily from Chinese and Soviet Marxists. Now they are in thrall to a faux-communist capitalist state. It says much that the Nepal Communist Party might not have existed without the Chinese looking for a new permanent friend in Nepal. Having invested so much, China has also sought to actively shape Nepali politics, much like India has done for all these years.

Nepali monarchy survived for so long following its restoration in 1950 because it was mighty useful to China. It died partly because its existence started threatening core Indian interests. The precariously placed, landlocked country has thus had to chop and change its institutions and politics in tune with changing Indian and Chinese interests. 

Look at our important national issues today: Kalapani, high-speed rail, hydropower development, tourism, remittance—they all depend on outside actors, mostly India and China. Nepali elections are won by demonizing India; the government formed thereafter tries to cover its incompetence by appeasing China. 

Isolated in his own party, KP Oli is again looking to secure his twin chairs by cultivating the Indians. But the rest of the NCP is still firmly in the Chinese camp. Nepali Congress, meanwhile, has taken upon itself to push the American MCC compact. In one way or the other, our domestic political actors are inviting foreign meddling as befits them.  

In this cloudy climate, it is impossible to gauge whether domestic politics influences foreign relations or vice versa. For instance, is Oli reaching out to India to save his chair? Or it is a case of India wanting to mend bridges with Oli, an old (if estranged) friend, as China tightens its grip on Nepal? China stitched up the NCP and now wants to forestall its split, an effort with as yet unclear ramifications for Nepal.   

In this interconnected world, it is hard for any country to remain unaffected by outside developments. But Nepal, primarily by the virtue of its unique geography, remains more vulnerable to foreign headwinds.

Are our opinion writers being true to the big responsibility they hold? This is a tricky question for a columnist to broach. I now have the challenge to settle it without a hint of self-aggrandizing superiority. 

As a columnist, I like to believe that op-ed columns influence how readers think about the issues discussed. But there are people who question whether editorials, columns, and op-eds, the output of arm-chair thinking as they like to call it, really matter. Some argue that people are so deeply invested in political affiliations and affected by personal experiences, they rarely change their stance. And, further, the political insiders who wield a disproportionate influence on policy outcomes hardly get influenced by mere columnists like us. But still, I am using this column to talk about the state of our op-eds, which, to a large scale, represent the state of our intelligentsia.

A case in point is a recent upsurge in pro-monarchy protests all over the country. As far as I know, preparations for them got under way long time ago. Influencers sympathetic to Hinduism and monarchy were being contacted all over the country, asked to be prepared for a ‘big show' in near future, and a strong effort at channelizing the dissent was underway.

The incident of Dolakha Bhimeshwar Mahadev idol's 'perspiring' was utilized to rake up the protests. There is a strong belief in Nepal that sweat beads appearing on that idol is a sign of some great upheaval in the country’s politics. It's a rare phenomenon, happening only once in decades. In the past, whenever that happened, the King used to carry out a Kshama Puja, seeking forgiveness from the god to be saved from the fury.

This definitely was the best setting to launch a protest in favor of monarchy. And the first protest was launched around a month back, a day after the 'sweat beads' appeared.

People are frustrated with the present state of affairs in Nepal. And they trust very few politicians. But do people then really trust the ex-king? If yes, what has swayed the opinion in his favor, in the past 14 years, from the time he had to submit to the democratic parties?

Not only had Gyanendra become unpopular because of his authoritative moves, his son, Crown Prince Paras's reckless behavior had also turned public sentiment against the monarchy. As it is, there was a large section of people who believed that Gyanendra and his family was somehow linked to the massacre that killed late King Birendra’s family.

But there has been an upsurge of opinions in national newspapers recently in favor of the monarchy. The beauty of op-eds is that they take a clear stand. That, there are arguments in favor of or against a particular issue, whether politics or policy related. But most of the opinions in our newspapers seem to disregard that even opinions have to be fact-based. And to ensure that is the duty of our editors.

Let's discuss something that has a strong correlation to the pro-monarchy rallies. Dec 15 this year marked the 60^th anniversary of the coup by King Mahendra. On 15 Dec 1960, Mahendra had sacked Nepal's first parliament and democratically formed government, and jailed the towering leader, BP Koirala. Naturally, this season of the year is flooded with opinions about Mahendra, BP, Panchayat and the coup.

Let's now compare three pieces published recently in Nepali newspapers around this topic. An op-ed in Kantipur daily by Saurabh gave Koirala the title of ‘fifth Beatles’. A difficult read as always—given the writer’s penchant for splattering disjointed references threaded loosely to prove his point—the aim of this piece seems to be to dispute BP’s view as a ‘self-claimed towering figure’ in his autobiography, and to accuse the Congress of forever relying on the crutch of that biography. But Saurabh touches a low when he announces that Congress is a party born to be in the opposition as power is unlucky for it. 'Unlucky', that's right, you read it correct.

In the same daily, Shankar Tiwari wrote another op-ed which tried to establish that Mahendra was power hungry, struck with inferiority complex due to the ‘Super Human’ BP's personality and hence staged the coup. Better than Sourabh's astrological prowess, this article tried hard to re-establish the official line of Nepali Congress at a time support for monarchy has been rising from the ashes. But this piece also fails to quote credible sources for all the dramatic events from the bygone era that has been used to prove the points. The reader can either trust the writer blindly or assume the sources.

Another interesting take on the topic is by Raamesh Koirala, published in the Naya Patrika Nepali daily. In a long piece, written in a nonchalant tone, Koirala disregards the personality conflict theory, and tries to establish that the coup was a result of geopolitical compulsions. Having touched upon the matter-of-fact details of the era, he says BP couldn't prove himself to be a better choice than Mahendra for India and the US. But, in a zest to prove his point that nothing but Machiavellian calculations count in politics, he states that the Tribhuwan Highway was made more meandering and difficult as King Tribhuwan had sold out to India.

While these arguments seem plausible, and are a perfect pitch for a gossip conspiracy theory session, stating something without proof in a national newspaper, I believe, violates some sort of professional decency.

Why are we fretting over these details? After all, opinions are just opinions! This has been the attitude of our editors and writers alike, whenever I have tried to discuss these issues.

But democracy survives on informed decisions by the masses. And unless the opinion makers believe in the big onus that's on their shoulders, it will be near impossible to stop this downward spiral of decadence we face today.

As with most questions of human behavior, the evidence of opinion columns changing opinions is mixed. But there can be no doubt that ideas matter—that powerful messages conveyed in compelling ways can change the course of political debates, movements, and elections.

And of course op-eds matter. So much so that no newspaper is complete without them. But are our op-eds keeping up with the radical upsurge in the standards and expectations of our readers?